Contents

Career

Harner received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963. In 2003 he received an honorary doctorate in shamanic studies from the California Institute of Integral Studies. In 2009 two sessions on shamanism were given in his honor at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

According to author Daniel Noel, while at UC Berkeley Harner sat on Carlos Castaneda's dissertation committee; Castaneda's dissertation was "Sorcery: A Description of the World," which he later published with few changes as Journey to Ixtlan.[1] Susan Grimaldi wrote an article for Shaman's Drum magazine in response to Noel's book.[2] Grimaldi notes that Harner never taught at UCLA where Castaneda was a graduate student.

In a 1977 article[3] for the official journal of the American Ethnological Society, Harner noted that it was well recognized that the Aztecs were unique in the world regarding the unparalleled scale of their human sacrifices. He also observed that their nutritional situation was similarly unparalleled for a major civilization, resulting in protein and fat scarcity. He proposed that widespread cannibalism, ritually presented as placation of the gods, explained the large-scale capture and sacrifice of war prisoners. Harner's theory was endorsed and supported by Marvin Harris[4], but criticized by Ortiz de Montellano[5] who suggested that the Aztec diet did not require cannibalism. (The subject of Aztec human sacrifice and cannibalism remains controversial as evidence continues to accumulate.)[6]

Way of the Shaman

The Way of the Shaman[7] is the first practical text on shamanism anywhere in the world and included important experientially tested evidence that shamanism and the shamanic journey were legitimate practices connected with an altered state of consciousness and entrance into another reality. He showed, also for the first time, how the shaman's drum, when used properly, was an effective tool in this process, just as he had earlier shown that hallucinogens were a legitimate tool in Amazonian shamanism and quite possibly in medieval European "witchcraft."[8] Roger Walsh and Charles S. Grob in an interview with Michael Harner in Higher Wisdom wrote that "What Yogananda did for Hinduism and D. T. Suzuki did for Zen, Michael Harner has done for shamanism, namely bring the tradition and its richness to Western awareness."[9]

Starting in the 1970's, Harner was the first to train contemporary Westerners in the practice of classic ways of shamanic healing such as guardian spirit and soul retrieval, spirit intrusion removal, shamanic depossession, and psychopomp work. His sharing of these methods with thousands of students was in the form of what he named, "core shamanism," his distillation through cross-cultural study, experimentation, and practice, of the underlying principles and practices of shamanism worldwide. Anthropologist Joan Townsend clearly distinguished Harner's core shamanism from neo-shamanism. [10]